For quite some time now, there have been two major areas of concern with the millions of fossil fuel-driven internal combustion engines in use in automobiles, heating systems, power generators, and the like. A first problem is in the pollution of the atmosphere caused by the noxious gases generated as by-products of combustion. A second problem is in the increasing shortage of the fossil fuels on which such engines depend. A substantial amount of research has thus been done with the objective of increasing the efficiency of existing engines so as to use less fuel, as well as searching for alternative sources of energy.
It has been known for many years that hydrogen has numerous advantages over fossil fuels. For example, hydrogen has a potential heat energy almost three times greater than any other fuel. In addition, hydrogen burns cleanly, producing only water as a combustion by product. Hydrogen can also be made from water by several processes, one of the most convenient being simple electrolysis.
However, the substitution of hydrogen for gasoline and other fossil fuels in engines presents practical problems which have delayed commercial acceptance, probably for several reasons. Primary among these has probably been the fact that hydrogen stored in its pure form presents a high potential for explosion.
Therefore, a number of researchers have pursued the concept of providing an auxilliary hydrogen generating cell, adjacent the engine, which provides hydrogen to augment the combustion of fossil fuels. Such cells typically use the electrical energy from a battery in a vehicle engine and/or other nearby electrical source to provide hydrogen by the electrolysis of water.
It has been found that when hydrogen from such a cell is mixed with a hydrocarbon-based fuel such as gasoline in the combustion chamber of a conventional engine, there is a substantially improved combustion efficiency and a marked reduction of noxious emissions.
While this has confirmed certain theoretical advantages of hydrogen supplementation, it has not yet yielded a practical or reliable system. We have observed two shortcomings in particular with existing systems, which typically use two different methods to introduce the hydrogen and oxygen into the combustion cylinder. In the first type of system, most normally used with gasoline internal combustion engines such as in passenger vehicles and small trucks, a vacuum created in the positive crankcase valve (PCV) line is used to withdraw hydrogen and oxygen gas from the electrolytic cell into the intake air manifold of the engine.
In the second type of system, most commonly used with larger vehicles such as diesel trucks having an air compression system typically required to operate the brakes, the auxiliary compressed air source is used together with a Venturi to create a vacuum across an opening adjacent the electrolytic cell, thereby forcing the hydrogen and oxygen gas from the electrolytic cell into the intake air.
While there is nothing in particular which is theoretically wrong with either of these approaches, we have found that in practice neither method works reliably or predictably. For example, the PCV vacuum-operated system seems to work reliably with some vehicles but not in others. This may be due to susceptibility to the ambient humidity or temperature, the condition of the PCV system, cleanliness of the PCV valve itself, whether the PCV system has a vacuum leak or a vacuum leak exists somewhere else, the general extent to which the engine is "in tune", and other factors which contribute to the magnitude and quality of the vacuum force provided by the PCV system.
The performance of a compressed air delivery system is also unpredictable in practice, there being many potential sources of difficulties with such systems. For example, although the compressed air source typically available on an eighteen wheel diesel truck is first fed through an air filter, to ensure that oil is not mixed in with the compressed air, some oil contamination inevitably seems to occur regardless of how careful the operator is. Once oil is mixed in with the electrolytic process, it possibly combines with the hydrogen gas in some way to adversely affect the electrolytic process. In other instances, the required Venturi may clog or rust, or may be difficult to locate the required Venturi, air filter, and pressure regulator in a place which is not prone to damaging vibration. In a number of other instances, the air filter becomes clogged with oil to such a degree that little or no air reaches the Venturi, thereby limiting the Venturi's ability to transfer hydrogen and oxygen from the electrolytic cell to the intake air.